Humanitarian and Relief Blogging
This is a brainstorming wiki for people interested in building systems for disaster and humanitarian relief response blogging. For a transcript of our IRC brainstorm on Wednesday Jan.25 please click here. To subscribe to the new email list for this effort please email: disasterplan-subscribe AT activist-tech DOT org Task List ---- List of IRC Participants on Wednesday Jan 25, 2006: * Alan Gutierrez (ThinkNOLA) from ThinkNola http://thinknola.com * Andy Carvin (acarvin) from Digital Divide Network http://www.digitaldivide.net, Katrina Aftermath http://katrina05.blogspot.com, TsunamiInfohttp://www.tsunami-info.org, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info * Angelo Embuldeniya (Angelo) from World Wide Help Grouphttp://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, QuakeHelp Wiki & Network http://quakehelp.blogspot.com, Asia Quake Database http://asiaquake.org, People 2 People Aid http://p2paid.org, Disaster Relief Blogger for Global Voices Online http://www.globalvoicesonline.org * Bala Pitchandi (bala) from World Wide Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, QuakeHelp Wiki & Network http://quakehelp.blogspot.com, RitaHelp Wiki & Network http://ritahelp.info * Chris Parker (ChrisALERTNET) from AlertNet http://www.alertnet.org * Dina Mehta (dina_m) from SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, QuakeHelp Wiki & Network http://quakehelp.blogspot.com, World Wide Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, Social Tools In Disasters http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/categories/socialToolsInDisasters * John Lebkowsky (jonl) from Peoplefinder http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project, ShelterFinder http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/ShelterFinder, Weblogsky http://www.weblogsky.com, WorldChanging http://worldchanging.com, SmartMobs http://www.smartmobs.com, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info * Mark Jones (MARKALERTNET) from AlertNet http://www.alertnet.org * Mikel Maron (mkl) from World Kit http://brainoff.com/worldkit * Neha Viswanathan from World Wide Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, QuakeHelp Wiki & Network http://quakehelp.blogspot.com, Asia Quake Database http://asiaquake.org, DesiPundit http://desipundit.com, South Asia Editor for Global Voices Online http://www.globalvoicesonline.org * Nic Fulton (Nic) from Reuters http://www.reuters.com in New York City, Reuters Consumer Products & Interactive TV http://mobile.reuters.com, Reuters Blog http://blogs.reuters.com, Reuters Labs http://labs.reuters.com * Paul Currion (paulcurrion) from Sahana http://cvs.opensource.lk, Relief Source http://www.reliefsource.org * Peter Griffin from World Wide Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, SMS 2 Blog http://smsquake.blogspot.com, MumbaiHelp Wiki & Networkhttp://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, Cloud Burst Mumbai http://cloudburstmumbai.blogspot.com, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, QuakeHelp Wiki & Network http://quakehelp.blogspot.com, Asia Quake Database http://asiaquake.org * Rachel Rawlins (frizzy) from The World Today at BBC World Service http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/worldtoday * Rebecca MacKinnon (RMacK) from Global Voices Online http://www.globalvoicesonline.org * Rudi Cilibrar (cilibrar) from HCV Action http://hcvaction.org, World Wide Help Grouphttp://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, Asia Quake Database http://asiaquake.org, KatrinaHelp Wiki & Network http://www.katrinahelp.info, SEA-EAT Group (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami)/TsunamiHelp Wiki & Network http://www.tsunamihelp.info, World Wide Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/worldwidehelp, CompLearn http://complearn.org IRC Transcript (Modified version After Connecting The Conversations Together) ''IRC log started Wed Jan 25 14:32:03 2006 '' greetings friends greetings hi, RMacK hello luisv RMacK: meeting in here this morning? yes we're going to talk about how blogger response to disasters Hello Rudi Hiya Peter! :) hey Rudi Hiya Dina! Hi Bala! Hi Rudi, Dina and everyone hey bala wow .. we seem to have lots of folk from the disaster help teams here More are on their way... :-) I should've invited Brian Oberkirch... I shoot him an email now. I just sent a note to Brian Oberkirch - he had the Slidell, Louisiana blog. thanks jonl Wish I'd thought to contact him sooner. :) Hi Rebecca hey nic hello andy and neha! hi all.. :) Hi Rebecca! wow, neha pleasure to see you could make it i know this is a tough time for you neha Hello everyone Hi Rebecca Hi Neha! What time is it there? Hi andy.. am in London.. so GMT time for me.. just that I had to talk my boss into this! :D Not too bad, then... hey mark! Hi Mark and everyone. hi folks Is there an agenda for our discussion? (sorry if this is a redundant question) so some quick introductions since not everybody here knows each other: we have mark jones, chris parker, and nic fulton on here from reuters & alertnet http://www.alertnet.org/ excellent great we have a major showing from the disaster blogging community dina mehta neha viswanathan, peter griffin, john lebkowsky, and a number of other people whose handles i dont all recognize Hi Dina hi Mark - there are lots of people here who worked on the disaster blogs and wikis And on peoplefinder and shelterfinder projects. Which we might want to describe. great Bala Pitchandi, Rudi Cilibrar Should everyone just introduce themselves in a few words? sure andy sounds good that would be good we could go tha alphabetical route -- tht'd be easier yes please provide urls of stuff you work on also fyi i'll try to dump everything on this wiki here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu:8080/globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Humanitarian_and_Relief_Blogging so please go ahead and self introduce andy, why dont u start - I'm Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network (http://www.digitaldivide.net). I ran Katrina Aftermath (http://katrina05.blogspot.com) and TsunamiHelp (http://www.tsunami-info.org), and contributed to SEA-EAT as well. Typing too fast without enough coffee in me - that should have said TsunamiInfo. :-) hey Andy Rudi Cilibrasi aka cilibrar cilibrar makes http://hcvaction.org/ , http://cilibrar.com/, asiaquake.org, katrinahelp.info, tsunamihelp.info, http://complearn.org/ and some others still in development Peoplefinder: http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project Shelterfinder: http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/ShelterFinder Jon Lebkowsky: blogger at Weblogsky.com, Worldchanging.com, Smartmobs.com et al. Senior Consultant and CEO at Polycot Consulting. Co-editor of Extreme Democracy. Longtime Internet guy. (I worked with Dina et al on tsunami-related news gathering and dissemination and was a coordinator at the PeopleFinder project.) Dina Mehta - http://dinamehta.com/ ; http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/categories/socialToolsInDisasters/ and worked on TsunamiHelp, Katrina Help and AsiaQuake Help blogs, wikis and helplines oops - i missed that in all the urls :) I'm Chris Parker and work on http://www.alertnet.org I'm Mark Jones and I edit http://www.alertnet.org Hi everyone - I am Nic Fulton from Reuters in New York City (but I'm a Brit). I lead the technology strategy for Reuters consumer products (http://www.reuters.com, http://mobile.reuters.com, interactive TV). I run http://blogs.reuters.com and lead the expermentation of http://labs.reuters.com . Frizzy is Rachel Rawlins, I'm here to watch and learn, I work for the BBC World Service, The World Today http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/worldtoday/ I am Bala Pitchandi, based in Woodbridge, New Jersey, a WorldWideHelp Blogger involved in various disaster relief blogs SEA-EAT, KatrinaHelp, RitaHelp, QuakeHelp Blogs and their associated Wikis. Personal Blog at http://balaspot.blogspot.com Neha/ http://nehasri.blogspot.com | TsunamiHelp | KatrinaHelp | AsiaQuake | http://desipundit.com | and South Asia Ed for GVO Hi. I'm peter griffin. worked onhttp://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/, http://www.tsunamihelp.info, http://tsunamienquiry.blogspot.com/, http://tsunamimissing.blogspot.com/, http://tsunamiupdates.blogspot.com/, http://tsunamihelpneeded.blogspot.com/, http://tsunamihelpoffered.blogspot.com/, http://www.asiaquake.org/, http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/, http://cloudburstmumbai.blogspot.com/,... ...http://katrinahelp.blogspot.com/, http://ritahelp.blogspot.com/, http://quakehelp.blogspot.com/, http://quakehelp.asiaquake.org/, http://smsquake.blogspot.com/ and now, the new collective, http://worldwidehelp.blogspot.com. and i blog at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com zigzackly = Peter Griffin Lets do a quick skills inventory next. Everybody brag in 70 chars or less! I program Ruby, rails, network admin, and am a radical. Ruby on Rails ++ cilibrar ;-) Paul Currion: aid worker: specialise in information management and technology (http://www.currion.net/imho.htm): interested in how new technologies might change relief work (http://www.reliefsource.org/an-ill-wind-the-role-of-accessible-ict-following-hurricane-katrina/): amongst other projects, contribute to Sahana (http://cvs.opensource.lk/), the open source disaster management platform am an ethnographer and qualitative researcher who is extremely curious about social tools and media in how they are bringing about new ways of communicating and collaborating and building communities Myself, Terry Way and Miles Whitehead did the first implementation of http://Alertnet.org. I am a programmer, not a developer, but spend a year at Stanford on the Reuters Digital Vision program (http://rdvp.org) question: what's the difference between programmer and developer? I can write code but I don't do process very well - i.e. I can do every version before you'd dare say you can support it! <-- serial offender on collablogs. (that was just the disaster relief blogs list :) ) and wiki amateur Blogging, vlogging, podcasting, mobcasting (collaborative phone-to-voicemail podcasts), RSS aggregating, coordinating online communities; researching communities that aren't online and why; but I can't dance worth a damn. @ andy. yay. something i can do that you can't! :) yeah, you got me there. But man can I type fast. :-) i'm a journo... fwiw I am a telecom engineer by day using all kind of *nix versions, and by night I cherish programming in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) I'm a web consultant, blogger, organizer, socializer. A lot of experience working with and managing online communities. Also do information architecture, data modeling, other dry stuff. Originally trained as a writer/journalist, I write quite a bit, mostly on blogs these days. I need to trumpet Chris Parker - he is the technology mastermind behind Alertnet and keeps everything running on way-to-little budget... has anybody out there not introduced themselves yet? ok... shall we move on.. i know some people here dont have a lot of time good I mean, let's do. the idea for this irc is really to have an initial gathering for people to get to know each other.. and brainstorm on how the disaster blogging community and alertnet might intersect for the greater public good It'd be cool and effective if we formed a network. wanna elaborate jonl? Sure... I think we all bring a lot of value via various projects, but we need to be able to standardize and centralize info during disasters... rather than doing a hierarchical centralized approach, we can be effective if we form a network and flow information to each other, and know what each other's doing. Is anyone from Recovery 2.0 joining us today? http://www.socialtext.net/recovery2/index.cgi One idea: use some common tagging in order for Alertnet to automatically incorporate content from 'acredited' blogs/bloggers. Sorta like PeopleFinder... integrated info from various sources and fed it back to/thru various sources. i agree; tags are powerful and can be used with a high degree of auotmatic intelligently such as at http://clo.complearn.org/ We worked on a system to automatically include content from the websites of NGOs using a search engine, but it would be much more effective if the 'publisher of content' tagged things in such a way that categorisation is not so tough. It would be good to agree up front how we do that. tags is great Yeah, I agree with Jon on the tagging as well -- it'd be a very effective way of aggregate information particularly during the early times of a disaster I'm interested in finding out whether it is possible to make use of existing humanitarian bloggers on alertnet and perhaps act as a catalyst for the creation of new bloggers in places where, frankly, mainstream media doesn't do much reporting. An agreed tagging system would be great there is one question here, which is what information is and isn't appropriate to be handled by bloggers, wiki-ists, etc paul ... can you expand that ? i.e. where can this have the most impact?? The recovery 2.0 folks - Jeff Jarvis et al - have been talking about open standards for online disaster response, including tagging. Ka Ping Yee, who should be here, developed the PFIF for sharing data about missing and found people. http://zesty.ca/pfif/ I created a tagging application for New Orleans. http://thinknola.com/ Not sure what Jeff's doing... have they sustained "Recovery 2.0"? Their wiki has been rather quiet, but I haven't been following their e-list. Recovery2.Net is building a prototype for demonstrating the possibility of extending protocols in RSS, geocoding, ping, stream aggregation and web services to capture and publish mapped relief/recovery information. I think it would be worth having us talk with Jarvis to get an update on where things stand; I think they were fundraising to get things going. good point andy. jarvis is on the globalvoices community list so he should have known about this i thought the work on People Finder was great stuff, but it does raise questions about security/confidentiality which were handled well, but in future developments needs to be handled very carefully Paul: I think we worked that out. Getting the info together and disseminated had priority over security at the time. But the team had overlooked a basic issue, quickly corrected. It would be cool to focus on, perhaps enhance, PFIF so that everybody's using a standard reporting format to facilitate aggregation of data. PFIF or something like itl. PFIF: http://zesty.ca/pfif/ PFIF meaning peoplefinder, jonl? RMack: the specific format we used. ah jonl - am working on standard using the example of PFIF to show that it can be done Paul: are you in contact with Ping? but trying to internationalise - to get away from US-centric tendency Dina identified remembering that the ICRC takes the lead in family tracing in most disasters ICRC got the PeopleFinder data... they didn't have much trouble mapping it to their db. They had a good set of engineers that had volunteered to help with stuff like that. jonl - yes - but if there can be an international standard that ICRC endorses, it presents other organisations with a bandwagon to jump on I should explain why PeopleFinder formed... it was because so much unstructured data was appearing on sites; intention was to put it all into a standard fomrat. Paul: our hope was to get ICRC to endorse or work from something like PFIF. But the main thing is to get something standard, that's published, and that everyone knows about. there's a fundamental problem in an emergency - lack of time means that data collection is very poor in the early stages of response - and problems with comms makes it difficult to collate and disseminate i agree with jonl - build a standard, open it up, let people use it as is Anyway, my take is that the read/write web doesn't work in a disaster. The real hero of Katrina was NOLA.com and e-mail. Doesn't work? I'm not sure I agree. Blogging takes a lot of churning, and the long tail is not fast enough. And SMS. And Ham. Not sure if I understand what you mean by "a lot of churning." acarvin: When your logging in from a hotel room in Birmingham, AL, it's difficult to adopt a new technology. there are ways to enable access to people to post information to a blog/wiki without any technical knowledge -- one example is a email2blog that we used in katrinahelp and another example is a Skype2Blog where users call in and leave a message at a local Tulane number which was blogged on our blog by volunteers -- so there are ways to enable access to anyone Bala: That's an excellent idea. Bala: Where is there a link? http://www.katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_Help_Line -- for voice mail We also had Audioblogger running on Katrina Aftermath, so people could call a number and have their voicemail posted as a podcast. Skype2Blog2Distribution lists :) think we worked that one out well on Rudi's wiki -- quakehelp using asterisk instead of skype ... And there's SMS to blog / wiki which we experimented with in tsunamihelp and afterwards, with not much success - but that was due to other factors with tsuamihelp, and with quakehelp, i think there just wasn't enugh cellphone penetration in the area ThinkNOLA: that's why it would be worthwhile to network our efforts. joni: That's why I'm here. To learn from the Tsunami experience. The tsunamihelp blog was the most effective response to the tsunami, IMO. i think its more a matter of coordination uncoordinated work is late, usually am happy about networking efforts ... i just am a little wary of it becoming a little US centric ... just an observation from the Recovery 2.0 things i have read Fair point, Dina; but I don't think there's a desire by Jeff or others to make it US centric. It just started after Katrina, so it's US centric in the same way SEAEAT is sometimes perceived as India centric. Dina: that's why it's good to work this thru GV. absolutely Jon ! One of the issues we face is that in a sudden onset disaster you tend to get a great deal of coverage in the first few days but that interest tends to tail off. We want to make sure that accounts from the scene carry on being published. So, while the first few hours of an emergency are interesting, we shouldn't forget the weeks after an emergency when, typically, conventional media loses interest MARKAL has a point. It's the follow-up when the parachuted reporters are brought back that news organisations struggle to cover stories, if the desire is there. A word of warning - my work on the DVFP at Stanford was looking at standardising reporting by NGOs to better enable sharing and pooling of resources. However, ironic as it might sound, this went against the interests of some NGOs who try to operate all aspects in any one area in order to apply their branding/photo opportunities etc. Essentially the NGOs compete for fund-raising, and... ...therefore don't feel much interest in working collaboratively with their competitors (other NGOs). Nic, I have heard the same story from several relief agencies. They are media aware. That's one argument for bottom up relief media efforts -- it could do a better job than large media outfits in illuminating the whole picture and releasing agencies from being so media aware nic thats pretty ironic This resistance to pooling information was why I went in a direction of pooling it by machine. Thankfully I think that bloggers don't have these same hang-ups because they understand better the economy of links and network effect that results. Nic: Where is your polling machine information? The machine 'pooling' was basically a search engine that indexed the web-sites of the NGOs to find the relevant reports and documents. It was a first version, but didn't work all that well so never got put onto alertnet.org. nic fortunately sharing information is what bloggers are about Agree that the media-machine that sits above the NGOs could do better in helping the network effect to be recognised. Mark - any comments on the tracking of spending of 'promises' and whether this is one way to encourage better behaviour? another aspect of followup failure is in ongoing server network costs and maintenaince .. which is still not quite solved on my end i'm in the process of getting some funding for backend stuff - a site, bandwidth, etc. rudi, bala, angelo and dina know a bit about that we get some $$$ durng disasters but then not enough in total cause people stop donating too soon apart from ppl stopping donations.. u get all those scams that went around as well ;) I also worry that this talk about Katrina is not entirely relevant to the Pakistan earthquake eg frizzy: Most likely. another point on disaster relief fundraising: after the pakistan earthquake a number of bloggers put up paypal buttons but it was not very clear where the money went and where people could reliably donate money I think Reb brought up an important point about fundraising during disaster relief by various blogs -- We ourselves have struggled a lot for funds -- many of us bloggers pitched in during the Tsunamihelp days from our own pockets but as we took on more projects it became difficult to host these wikis -- Maybe a clearinghouse org that has some funds to help support the various efforts... and can be nexus. @jonl -- that's a good idea And that could be a GV subproject? to return to bala's point on funding, i think it would be really good to have a politically/religiously neutral "goto" page that bloggers can send people to for funds donation Infrastructure: content, $$, standards, metadata. jonl, gv has no staff so the community needs to help organize this project and run it RMack: but would need an entity to collect and distribute funds. If not GV or a sub, some light NGO for that purpose, with trusted admin. jonl are you talking $$ for relief or $$ to create the tech infrastructure? $$ to create and sustain infrastructure. ok that's different Relief is handled elsewhere. and thats where Reuters and the GV link can bring credibility to the fund raising to get the resources going maybe this is something that alernet would like to host? Alertnet might be ideal. I think alertnet in close coordination with GV would be an ideal model to handle these funds is there going to be transparency on this funding... what ppl want most today as i've seen is accountability and transparency of funds... whatever it is for -- how exactly is that going to happen? yes - and learnings from all the problems on credibility around paypal buttons is accountability and transparency do we need to be doing funds collection or do we just need to be pointing people to reliable orgs that are already doing that? i dont think we should get into the biz of handling funds i don't think so either ;) rebecca - a list of neutral NGOs that perhaps GV's network, alertnet, and our other networks can help vet? we are not in position to handle funds RMacK: I understand the concern but I'm not sure we should depend on a patchwork of other orgs. GV may not want to do it, but there should be some structure, some way to ensure $$ are there when needed. Having to make an ask in the middle of a disaster is a hassle. no we shouldnt - we simply need funds to run the servers the minute we start collecting funds - we will have huge problems but group could redirect to InterAction, DEC, ICVA, who are all credible groups of organisations that can guide donors goto page with list of possible charities... On the topic of fundng for aid projects, etc. -- my take: we have people/volunteers, knowledge/resources -- we just need the $$$ to power the resources :D how would funds be distributed? would it not be better to direct people to existing responses paul -- could you expand on 'existing responses'? bala - there seems to be two models for fundraising - 1. give to a 'credible' organisation, 2. micro transfer to a community group on the ground where personal links exist how about -- alertnet handle the funds and GV handles the transparency ;) alertnet provides a guide to charities on the ground based on its membership -- hand on heart this tends to be western/northern focused because of problems in validating charities but it is the best available markalertnet, maybe we need to create "buttons" bloggers can stick on their sites to send readers to the relief page alertnet has some experience in handling an emerency relief fund -- Aidfund -- this is not something to be entered into litghtly -- we outsource vetting of projects to emergency relief professionals and there are always complaints about which emergencies it is relaesad to jonl, i'm interested in talking about standards and metadata at the appropriate time, especially geospatial data Good. jonl; I'd be interested to discuss too mkl - one of the projects I am working on is to develop a humanitarian GIS data model (http://www.humanitariangis.com) and there is a standard for geospatial metadata that the UN Geographic Information Working Group has developed thanks paulcurrion, i'll dig into that UNGIWG http://www.ungiwg.org my experience has been in developing rather lightweight spatial data standards, like geoRSS http://recovery2.net/ is one idea i've come across on mapping we would be very interested in working on this -- mashing up blog entries and google earth (or similar) might help get more people interested in material and details of what's actually happening need to involve Mikel Maron, who is good on this Does anyone here to know anything about UNOCHA's Virtual Disaster Collaboration Site -- OSCOCC? or has anyone used it apart from peter/Bala? I know OSCOCC awesome! I'm familiar with OSOCC rather - I used OSOCC So Paul -- you do know there s ground real-time info there that others can benefot from during an activer emmergency. Virtual OSOCC is only open to emergency relief professionals Yea, it's a restricted message board Apparently quite useful and successful for those involved Well during the South Asia Quake they opened it .. or opened up user accounts or something like that anyways And with permission someone at UNJLC started collaborating with the quakehelp bloggers. and others in and out of pakistan AlertNet supplies a feed of emergency news alerts to OSOCC but not allowed to see postings due to security issues When i was using it, I never saw any feeds from alertnet The only feeds that came in were from relief folks on the ground... what security issues? angelo - a lot of information in an emergency is sensitive - for instance, if WHO wants to lead a discussion about a possible epidemic, they don't want to do it publicly because it might lead to panic emergency teams give details of where and when they flying in or stayng plus phone numbers -- not something that could be opened up Ageed there Mark -- but there were maps -- hand drawn maps that were very useful to getting aid where itwas most needed. angelo - UN is very sensitive about releasing maps (esp hand-drawn) because of liability issues Finally the info you're talking about -- chooper coordinates, etc. were actually opened up by UNJLC and UNDAC... to bloggers, etc... there's proof of this on the situation reports at the PK UNJLC site.. Maybe Dina et al should talk about the response to the tsunami? i think with GV our greatest strength is the network ofpeople all over the world absolutely Dina. a network such as GV has would have been invauluable during tsunamihelp yes - is the one thing we really missed during the tsunamis - having more people on the ground Dina ++ if and when there is another disaster - i would love to pull in people from there people who are on the ground ... and are networked in some way - SMS, blogs, email, landlines, skypelines SMS especially. http://gdacs.org/ GDACS is one publicly accessible agency coordination effort they're publishing a number of RSS feeds which can be reused about gdacs.org -- very useful and so is hemsweb.org GDACS is good, HEWSWeb is also good (http://www.hewsweb.org/home_page/default.asp) i think we need a predefined set of persistent categories and tags so that when disaster strikes we are ready like helptech channel on irc absolutely Rudi thats a great first step a place to leave yourself logged in if you are technical and interested in helping / need help figuring something out many bored cubeslaves already do this at work ... We probably need to collaborate on a plan that's documented and disseminated via GV. how about fieldhelp channel for on-the-ground people at disaster? if GV and Reuters together can work (with us of course :) ) on aggregating info around disasters using something as simple as tags - i think that would be a great first step so it seems to me that we are converging that we need: 1. a pre-agreed system thru which bloggers and anybody else can react as quickly and effectively as poss; 2. how alertnet can help get info out to broader public and also help funnel more people into participating and 3. how to bring in the NGOs Rmack -- we're forgetting distro lists ;-) angelo wanna explain? distribution lists -- hooked to the pre-agreed system./ARC model -- anyone care to explain it out... / number 767 pre-defined... forwards to distro lists on which stakeholder in a disaster are subscribed to - filter mechanism of messages, etc. The ARC model was to say that all messages are filtered to those who need it.. in that sense like an RSS feed based on certain "markups" got it angelo distro lists woul have various groups -- bloggers, wikipedians, agencies aid, relief folks, etc... these distro lists are then the bridge that links the bloggers, ngos and all others involved together coordination with mainstream media is critical. alertnet support would be great what infrastructure is thought of to aid coordination? content distribution is good, but how to funnel that in a usable way. Is mapping on the agenda...? RMack: also standards for data collection. yes, jonl i agree. standards would fit into item #1 Would be good to include encourging more bloggers from the so-called 'forgotten crises' -- Congo, N Uganda, Colombia etc +1 to MARKALERTNET's suggestion ++1 yes good point mark Rebecca - I do agree with that. and an element of standardisation would help us at alertnet use the content ..and which this community can help build? in terms of infrastructure, until we have $$ we cannot build good fault tolerant systems that can handle high load. We need $5k-$20k to build highly scalable / reliable systems cilabar, ok good to know. i have heard thru various people that there's a possibility some folks at yahoo might be interested in helping on some of this also if the community is interested yahoo are interested Yes we have gotten $3k so far donated but there is a great deal of confusion online. would be cool if we could create a series of buttons for people/situations that currently need help and promote them w/ bloggers Excellent idea - buttons that drive audience to donate - then a kudos counting so the most generous audiences get a round of applause. would the firefox model help here in terms of buttons and roll calls? RMacK "buttons" is a great idea and i can also help wit the buttons so the question is would alertnet be willing to host this, and maybe we set up a donation system to raise money for it? this donation system needs to be transparent :D -- the only reason im stessing so much on this is my furstation with the INGOs that i've seen who aspend atleast 75% of aid $$ on operations alone with ther est actually being used for the real purposes -- i doubt im the only one whos been thru it.. many otehrs have as well.. :D Does anyone have any contact with NetworkforGood.org? also about charity navigator -- how sure are we that theres accountability going on within the orgs listed there? -- is tehr any way to check on that? @andy -- u mentioned NetworkforGood -- Anyone done any playing with Sugarcrm (www.sugarcrm.org) -- they have a nice interface for the whole transparency of it all.. but thats just a pointer -- there are many others.. and sugarcrm is open source.. Or CiviCRM. Which works with Drupal/CivicSpace. yahoo did a good job handling donations for redcross during katrina civicrm just came out with the donations module in 1.3 -- yes that would be nice as well! Yahoo also quickly integrated the PeopleFinder data. am waiting to hear back from them on whether they will participate in a standards process that is launching now (Jan/Feb) paul who are you in touch with at yahoo? i have some contacts there as well the main people have been James Jones and Jeremy Johnstone yahoo (or a faction within them) want to pursue the katrina work but extend it maybe they might be interested in helping more systematically on that front We could check with folks in Yahoo about this and see how much they are interested in this -- but AlertNet would be more relevant here as they are involved in World Disasters yes i agree bala, alertnet has the closest fit in terms of substance and mission alertnet has a good reputation in the sector (not trying to win friends or anything!) Yes looks like alertnet to me too nic, chris, mark, what is your view on getting yahoo involved also? wouldn't want to rule anything out Yahoo can bring one significant asset - a very large audience. Technically they could do hosting, money processing etc., but the audience has to be their biggest asset. they also have the tools for things like tagging (delicious) and photoblogging (flickr) at their fingertips, which appeals to me i could see the maps team being interested too maps team -- Declan Butler -- ! yes - declan also with Nature works with my advisor Paul Vitanyi... and the google/nasa ames team kathryn Cramer, Anne Wright and Declan Butler work on most of the disaster mapping datasets -- h5n1 maps have been coming ou form Declan -- im guessing this is somethng they'd be interested in helping out with... ;) h5n1? h5n1=avian flu ah I have been doing some h5n1 work also lately... Speaking of of the H5N1 relief response -- has anyone been monitoring the confusion online? so many blogs.. so many wikis.. so many advisories... the lack of a centralized place to monitor h5n1 spreading out ;) seems that maybe what we do is have the community plus alertnet sort out a plan, then if there is anything reuters/alertnet and GV (which has no staff) cannot handle we can think about what we might reach out to yahoo for? reb -- we would be glad to help out with the resource needs We might also take this to the Omidyar Network. Omidyar is a good bet. Also Soros's open society. We could start a thread about this in the Omidyar community. i agree we should pull in as many actors as possible into the coalition. alertnet, yahoo, google, omidyar, osi.. then that will minimize duplication if everybody is working together As long as we can network and avoid silos. silos? no NDA's either Jon !!! heh. Whats an NDA? NDA - non-disclosure agreement thank you Dina :D Google has also been very helpful in the past. they gave us unlimited bandwidth during tsunamihelp's high traffic days. it might be worth looking at some coordination with them (that unlimited bandwidth was because of Bala's friend in Google) good point zigzackly. i know folks over there I also have a few friends in Google -- i can get them involved in this so how do we want to proceed. we are getting some fabulous ideas here. @Rmack -- something along the lines of getting centralized ;) data with decentralized data access control... Who can make a first-pass doc based on this discussion? That would be a good start. Then we could iterate. would be great if somebody could volunteer to do that another issue here is --- who 'owns' the data or flows ... we must be clear that no one group takes ownership in any way --- that would vitiate the magic in the community that comes together dina i think it is important not to make leadership illegal in our community if we want to ensure technical planning can take place am happy with leadership Rudi not necessarily 'ownership' cilibrar.. without leadership there will be no planning :-) so who will volunteer as the leader? ;-) did u mean ownership rudi? i don't think so but these are tricky words to get right in casual use Oh and we don't want to have volunteers/data miners getting sued again by other charity organizations like what we went thru with ppl finder records during KatrinaHelp.... good point! i think several lists are needed. (1) organisations we want to contact and liaise with would be one, with reasons why + contact people + volunteers to get in touch. I think we might do well with a wiki for this, initially. do we want to create a google group? or get everybody here to sign up on an existing disaster blogging list? would we like to use the GV wiki? if so i have thrown up this page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu:8080/globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Humanitarian_and_Relief_Blogging I think so. we have wordldwidehelp for coordination, if you want it was et up for that reason I can create an email list in a couple of seconds if we want to go that route. OK... list created. thanks nic! disasterplan@activist-tech.org do we e-mail that list to sign up? To subscribe, blank email to disasterplan-subscribe@activist-tech.org ah great thanks jon np thanks jonl is there a web inteface for that list? pls say yes! Angelo... you mean for archives? Not now, but we could probly set that up. i mean just like at GV -- the lists there I set up the list archive to be indexed for web access, if that's what you mean... If you mean particpating via web, you could do that from gmail or yahoo mail or whatever... (There's another step to make the archive visible.) oh no i mean rss feeds from it, etc. i mean remember katrina Jon -- wasn't there a prob with the email list or something -- it got shut down right.. Hmmm... I never thought about doing the RSS thing. I'll see if we can figure out how to make that happen. am just thinking ahead thats all.. Angelo: no problem with the list that I recall. In fact, those lists still exist. then how come i don't get mail on them? :D was it closed off due to the psammers? Nobody's using them anymore. oh ok -- that explains it... http://groups.google.com/group/WorldWideHelp is available for this, and already has many of the people in this room on the list theres about 50 folks on the worldwidehelp list already including a un dude -- surprising.. but interesting he's there... but i'm just soucing info... ... ah well maybe we should use zigzackly's list? Either list is fine with me. if a lot of people in this room are already on that list, maybe that makes sense, since everybody is already subscribed to too many lists re: lists: sounds like we should just use zigzackly's list I can make a list so that only members can participate. This one is set up that way. shall we just use http://groups.google.com/group/WorldWideHelp ? rebecca - we use that as a central group, and create new specific groups when the need arises reb -- yes we can -- it has many influential folks almost all our groups related to disaster blogging are all yahoo or google Bala: I see that as a weakness. lets use the worldwidehelp list unless somebody violently objects RMack - my only concern is that Google and Yahoo groups live at Google and Yahoo. are you worried we may get turned over to homeland security? More that a TOS change in the future could create issues for participants. That sorta thing. i know enough people at google that i feel i could raise bloody hell if there was a prb If you do use a Google group, it should probably be a new group, no? why new group if existing one already includes a lot of the people were working w/ RMacK: just that we haven't asked... concern being that some members might object, but Idon't know that list. sorry if there are any yahoo fans here.. but yahoo has too many adverts on their list services.. i dont want to use yahoo for many reasons but i am ok w/ using google group Can't we have a listserv that's not yahoo/google based? for discussion lists, a neutral solution might be dgroups whats dgroups? http://www.dgroups.org/ more for development, but supported by good organisations dgroups isn't a bad idea, particularly since it's development oriented very basic services, but quite well-run but if we want a listserv thats not yahoo/google based lets go with the thing jonl just made? well if we're going to have a list thats not google/yahoo based -- what kind of TOS will we be under? Whatever y'all decide is okay... the list I made is there. we are in trouble if we cant even decide what email list to use ;-) It's just a list. Jon does your list have the same thing dgroups/google groups has? in terms of rss'ing/tagging and searching and export/import? Angelo: no. It's just an ezmlm email list. angelo --- why dont you take that up later ? ok lets try that again: Jon: could we get the same thing on your list in the future ? atlest some of those things... Angelo: I think that's a good idea; I'll talk to the more technical guys at Polycot and see if that's doable. Let's start there, we ca move if needed. disasterplan-subscribe@activist-tech.org lets just use jon's list for now ? i agree. i'm open to anything. don't mean to shove stuff down anyone's throat. the list already exists, is all. seems the path of least resistance :) Heh. ok lets use jon's list. so please everybody subscribe to it Well, it's there, at least. whatever. I'd suggest GV (or someone from GV) to be the nodal point & lead for this happy for GV to be the nodal point. I think somebody with more disaster relief/blogging experience should lead the effort I am not that person plus i am trying to run GV as a whole can that somebody who will be leading also ensure we don't get caugt in red tape anytime ;) or relief politics either.. there was lot of that during katrina and the quake... good point angelo Andy? Bala: I can certainly help a bit, but I'm also conducting a job search right now so that's eating up a lot of time./ @andy - oh ok as i mentioned, GV has no staff and "membership" is nothing more than involvement in the community so anybody here can help lead this effort as part of a GV effort i welcome somebody with experience to step up and volunteer would love to actively support, but am setting up organisation at moment (ironically, to look at exactly these issues) paul will your org be willing to work with this effort or should we try to merge w/ it? (no point people duplicating efforts) erm... don't want to make specific commitment - impetus to organisation is so many initiatives going on, so little co-ordination but in near future I would definitely want to make sure that we were contributing makes sense however somebody really really needs to volunteer or be nominated by this group to lead this effort moving forward i am trying to lead GV over all but we need somebody focused more directly on this for leadership - we need a combination of tech skills and coordination skills ... am going to plunge in here and recommend Bala/Peter/Rudi or Angelo for this --- i haven't worked with too many others and so am going with folks i know need to go as well - would like to commit - but time constraints might kick in (ie will be in Darfur 4 weeks feb-mar!) ok so bala/peter/rudi/angelo/dina/jonl are our leading committee? i'm okay with that. can't handle a solo commitment - too many things happening - but i'm happy to work with bala, rudi, angelo, dina and john We might want to be able to do that in other contexts, too. Heh... we all forgot to step backward. Maybe we consider this list a core coordinating list. And consider other technologies for broader use later. i agree with Jon -- core coordinating i am happy to lead a tech / science group that works only in ruby and C Rudi: my company's going nuts over Ruby right now. Rudi -- what about ajax/php? no can do mi amigo no can do ajax si php no we need a combination rebecca --- each one has strengths - lets keep a core group working on this ? ok sure. i just want to make sure somebody takes responsibility for moving things forward :-) i know :) ..following up on things, connecting the conversations, etc personally.. i think the group leadership should be quite flexible it helped maintain a great amount of perspective in all the projects So make sure the core group subscribes, and anyone else who wants to kibitz. "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters" I have a question -- please yes angelo? Where exactly are we expected/supposed to start and where -- are we talking multiple disasters -- don't forget tehre are mroe than 3 active ones right now... ... what's the task list -- does anyone have soemthing in mind? just a feeler if u will :D Angelo: maybe our first disaster is US foreign policy. heh lol heh I'll like to keep politics outta this pls -- ghot burnt during the tsunami in sri lanka -- learnt from tehre i guess :D Sorry, I've been a little twisted about politics lately. good questions angelo. you want to draft a task list? lol.. thank you :D neha --- since you know how to whack people into shape with such a sweet smile ... can you handle connecting the conversations etc ? lol am pretty willing to be the whacker ok - so we have a whacker :) "Sergeant at arms." But I think we're just getting infrastructure in place for response.